Being With Course Participants' Companion

Sally Hitchiner, Samuel Wells

Description

The Being With course is an introduction to Christianity with a difference. Rather than being a Bible study or a series of arguments to try to convince you that God exists, it starts with the conviction that you already have a wealth of understanding of truth, beauty and goodness that will help you, in the company of others, to recognise God’s presence in your life and your everyday experiences. At its heart is the idea that God’s greatest desire is to be with us in Jesus. That’s the reason the world was created; that’s why you were created. Over a period of ten weeks, you will discover dimensions of this presence and what it means to live abundantly with God, with one another and with creation.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Ministry
• Philosophie et théologie
• Evangelism

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786224446
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEING WITH
A Course Exploring Christian Faith and Life
Participants’ Companion
Sally Hitchiner





© Sally Hitchiner 2022
First published in 2022 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1-78622-442-2
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd




Contents
Introduction

Week One: Meaning
Week Two: Essence
Week Three: Jesus
Week Four: Church
Week Five: Bible
Week Six: Mission
Week Seven: Cross
Week Eight: Prayer
Week Nine: Suffering
Week Ten: Resurrection




Introduction
Welcome to the Being With course!
The Being With course was written by Revd Dr Sam Wells and me, Revd Sally Hitchiner, as we worked together at St Martin-in-the-Fields church. We wanted to find a way to help people who found themselves on the edges of our church to explore the Christian faith afresh. The heart of what we believe is that God’s methods are never different from what God wants to communicate, so we wanted the course to feel like our message as well as speaking it. There are lots of ways to discover the facts about what Christians believe through books or websites, but there is only so much you can learn through facts. So we created this course to be an immersive experience of learning how to be with ourselves, with others and the world around us, and learning how to be with God.
Spoiler Alert
The course isn’t a Bible study or a series of arguments to try to convince you that God exists. We’re not anxious to fix you. We start with the belief that you already have a wealth of experiences of truth, beauty and goodness that will help you, in discussion with others, to find God, just from your normal experiences of life.
We also start with the idea that God’s greatest desire is to be with us in Jesus. That’s the reason the world was created. It’s the reason Jesus died: he wasn’t going to abandon us even if it meant he was caught up in something that killed him. This being with God is the ultimate destination of humanity. Christianity isn’t fundamentally about sin. It’s not about being good enough to pass the test to get to the good place when you die. It’s certainly not about excluding people. God wants to be with us. God wants to be with you and every other human being who has ever lived, and God wants us to be with God. That’s it. That’s the litmus test for working out what is authentic Christianity and what isn’t.
The course is about helping you to discover yourself and God and to learn to be conscious of God being with us in the world. It’s also about learning to be with others. The course gathers people from a wide variety of life experiences. We are aware that the normal ways of interacting often reinforce hierarchies and expectations of who someone is. Because we ask participants to step into a different way of interacting with each other from the one you’d have in a social or work context, we hope to disrupt this and create more opportunity for people to be truly themselves and experience a more authentic version of the others in their group.
How to use this guide
This companion guide is intended to walk with you through the course. There’s no need for any prior religious knowledge or language: just what you have learnt in your life so far. Respond to a personal or general invitation: you may be asked for some contact information but no one should chase you if you decide it’s not for you; and then just show up at the first meeting, onsite or online. I’ll explain our methods as we go, as your course hosts will do. It’s more about getting into a way of interacting than about doing things in a certain way, but I’ve added a little introductory explanation for the first few weeks to familiarize you with the key components of the course. Either you can either read each week’s content before you do your session in the group, or you can read it afterwards if you missed something. The course is about the experience of being in a group rather than the information you’ll learn, so the focus should be on the group. Some people feel more able to engage with a group if they know what is likely to happen; others find it distracting. If you’re the type of person who feels more comfortable knowing what’s coming throughout the entire course then do read the introductions to the welcome and wonderings in advance.
The ten-week course of 90-minute onsite or online video-conference group meetings of six to 14 people has two leaders, one called the host and the other called the storyteller. Each week follows the same four-part pattern:
Welcome – This is an invitation to be with yourself as you start the session and to share something of who you are right here and now with the group.
Wonderings – The centre of the course is not information, but an invitation to be with others and wonder about significant areas of life together. We ask people to receive what is shared without comment or competition but as a gift, with a simple ‘Thank you’.
Talk – Our own experiences are then brought into dialogue with thinking about the being-with themes from around the world and throughout history.
Reflection – This is an opportunity to ease back into the way we interact in normal life, in dialogue and discussion. You can raise thoughts, objections and questions about what you’ve heard, and reflect together with other participants about what it might mean in your life.
Who are we?
As you’re putting your future in our hands, I should tell you a little about who we are. As well as being vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Sam is a globally recognized academic theologian who specializes in theology that is immersed in real life. His writing about being with is celebrated by archbishops and professors in the most prestigious universities in the world. My contribution is 20 years of experience of reimagining the interface between church and society in the national media, and building Christian communities in universities, churches and online with people who find churches inaccessible. In any of those contexts, there is little space for faith that isn’t serious enough to hold real life. I want to know God in real life. I’m not interested in helping people to reduce who they are as if that will make it easier to find real faith. This course hopes to help you be more who you are, engage with more about your fellow humanity and the world around us and discover more about who God really is. We cannot really know someone from a distance. We can only really know ourselves, others or God by risking sharing ourselves and by being open to friendship. That’s the heart of our method: inviting you to explore relationship.
This participants’ guide is written with thanks to those who trusted us enough to come on the early courses as we figured things out. It takes guts to put yourself forward to explore faith when you haven’t explored it before. Perhaps it takes even more courage to put yourself forward to be part of a guided group exploring faith when you have had bad experiences of church. In the world-weary days of the Covid-19 pandemic, these people have led Sam and me to a fresh discovery of our faith as they invited us to discover Jesus afresh through their eyes. Is there a better gift? We wouldn’t be here without their honesty, hope and kindness. You know who you are.



Week One: Meaning
We start the course with the invitation to be present. This moment is here, waiting to be engaged with and we don’t want you to miss it. We ask you not to be doing anything else when you are being with – resist the urge to check emails or text messages; where possible, if you are joining online, try to keep your camera on so others can see you present with them. Even deeper than these simple acts of generosity, we invite you to start to imagine what it would be like to step away from the things that preoccupy our minds with the past or the future. You are invited to truly live, here and now, to truly be with yourself, with others and the world around you and with God.
Welcome
We start each week with a welcome question for each person to respond to when they are ready. Today’s is:
What has brought you to this course?
People have different reasons for doing this course and I hope you will quickly learn that there are no wrong answers here. Some of you may have had an experience that makes you wonder about what you believe about God and the meaning of life ‒ a baby is born or you have a brush with death when you or someone close becomes ill. You want to live more purposefully and to work out what you want to look back at at the end of life and be glad you lived by.
For others it may be about a person, someone in your life who has caught your imagination by what their faith means to them. It might be your partner, it might be someone at work or a friend or f